October Vagabonds eBook

Although we as yet knew every foot of the ground we
were treading, it already began to wear an unfamiliar
houseless and homeless look, an air of foreign travel,
and though the shack was but a few yards behind us,
it seemed already miles away, wrapped in lonely distance,
wistfully forsaken. Everything we looked at seemed
to have gained a new importance and significance;
every tree and bush seemed to say, “So many miles
to New York,” and we unconsciously looked at
and remarked on the most trifling objects with the
eye of explorers, and took as minute an interest in
the usual bird and wayside weed as though we were engaged
in some “flora and fauna” survey of untrodden
regions.

“That’s a bluebird,” said Colin,
as a faint pee-weeing came with a thin melancholy
note from a telegraph wire. And we both listened
attentively, with a learned air, as though making
a mental note for some ornithological society in New
York. “Bluebird seen in Erie County, October
1, 1908!” So might Sir John Mandeville have noted
the occurrence of birds of paradise in the domains
of Prester John.

“That’s a silo,” said Colin, pointing
to a cylindrical tower at the end of a group of barns,
from which came the sound of an engine surrounded by
a group of men, occupied in feeding it with trusses
of corn from a high-piled wagon. “They
are laying in fodder for the Winter.” Interesting
agricultural observation!

In the surrounding fields the pumpkins, globes of
golden orange, lay scattered among the wintry-looking
corn-stalks.

“Bully subject for a picture!” said Colin.

Before we had gone very far, we did stop at a cottage
standing at a puzzling corner of cross-roads, and
asked the way, not to Versailles, indeed, but to—­Dutch
Hollow. We were answered by a good-humoured German
voice belonging to an old dame, who seemed glad to
have the lonely afternoon silence broken by human
speech; and we were then, as often afterward, reminded
that we were not so far away from Europe, after all;
but that, indeed, in no small degree the American continent
was the map of Europe bodily transported across the
sea. For the present our way lay through Germany.

Dutch Hollow! The name told its own story, and
it had appealed to our imaginations as we had come
upon it on the map.

We had thought we should like to see how it looked
written in trees and rocks and human habitations on
the page of the landscape. And I may say that
it was such fanciful considerations as this, rather
than any more business-like manner of travel, that
frequently determined the route of our essentially
sentimental journey. If our way admitted of a
choice of direction, we usually decided by the sound
of the name of village or town. Thus the sound
of “Wales Center” had taken us, we were
told, a mile or two out of our way; but what of that?
We were not walking for a record, nor were we road-surveying,
or following the automobile route to New York.